To my surprise, I've come across another 1st world war poet & novelist with strong Kent connections.

Richard Aldington was born in Portsmouth, but spent a significant part of his youth in Dover. "I hate that town," he declared in his poem Childhood.

This poem must comprise one of the most negative reviews that Dover has ever had, (and there may have been a few!)

According to Aldington, in pre-First World War Dover, the weather was awful, the streets were dull, the civic buildings grim, the shops shabby, the school and church uninspiring and even the museum was substandard (!)

It is a striking poem, but almost comic in its petulance.

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/childhood-6/#

In fact, Aldington's attitude to East Kent may have been more ambivalent than expressed in this poem.

In her edition of the letters of Aldington and his first wife Hilda Doolittle, Caroline Zilboorg comments that the young Aldington "relished the countryside in the South of England, its flowers, hills, chalk cliffs and seas... he became a great walker, setting off for long hikes... in the rural South Foreland... He enjoyed swimming and dreamy afternoons in the sun... and collecting butterflies."

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=kkUd4xTwEJEC&dq=%2B%22richard+aldington%22+%2Bchildhood&source=gbs_navlinks_s

His preoccupation with sea swimming leads me to think that a local girl may have inspired his poem Daisy.

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/daisy-3/

Aldington became a key figure in the "Imagist" poetic movement that included Ezra Pound, F.S. Flint, Amy Lowell and his first wife H.D. (Hilda Doolittle.) 

His active service, both as a private & an officer, in the First World War was a formative experience. Aldington was a prolific writer but best known for his war poems and his novel Death of a Hero.

Having read the early chapters  of his autobiography, Life for Life's Sake: A book of Reminiscences, I understand more about Aldington's love/hate relationship with East Kent. It seems that, in the Summer months, Aldington and his family lived at South Foreland. He revelled the wildness of the place and the freedom that he had there. A move back to town (and school,) deprived him of this: "You can not experience the force of such elemental powers in a town... In the town I was being manufactured into the sort of human product a not too intelligent provincial society thought I should be; whereas in the country, I was busily but unconsciously developing into something on my own."

Aldington was fascinated by the contrast between the bleak chalk coastline of South Foreland and the fields of wheat, barley, hops and the orchards only 6 miles further inland.

He marvelled at the natural and man-made heritage of East Kent in the early 1900s: "By a wonderful stroke of luck I had glimpses of an England, a nook of it, which had changed little since Shakespeare or even Chaucer."

But, in his sweeping fashion, he asserted that, by 1910,  all of this heritage was lost!

Since this year marks the hundredth anniversary of the 1st aeroplane flight across the English Channel, i'll leave you with another of Aldington's acid comments:

"In 1909, the conservative inhabitants suffered the unbearable affront of having Bleriot land his airplane on their cliffs."

2

I don't know exactly when Aldington's family moved to Dover, so it's been been nagging at me that I ought to find evidence that the poem Childhood is set in Dover rather than Portsmouth. (I don't want to besmirch Dover with this poem unnecessarily!)

"I was taken to a High Church;

The parson's name was Mowbray"

said Aldington. I think that this must have been St Bartholomew's church on the corner of London Rd & Templar St, (which was demolished in 1972.)

In the early 1900s the vicar of St Bartholemew's was the Rev Edmund George Lionel Mowbray.

So, there you have it- unfortunately, Dover IS likely to be the hated town of the poem.

http://www.dover.freeuk.com/church/stbarts.htm

3

This is confirmed by passages of a letter of 20/11/1917 from Aldington to Amy Lowell: "I hated Dover which is the place I meant in Childhood." However, in the same letter, he has praise for another East Kent town: "Later I lived at Sandwich, a town of immense antiquity, the great port of England in the reign of Edward III. I loved its great circle of walls, its barbican and turreted gates, its old winding grass-grown streets, and air of immemorial languor." This is published in Richard Aldington: An Autobiography in Letters by Norman T. Gates:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=drdITtc_DlMC&dq=richard+aldington+autobiography+in+letters+gates&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=w4k_

cB4LVX&sig=dgSpjgmjDs7w826DiDJ5lIJwiy4&hl=en&ei=OD74SqrFJoLU4QbJ2_XeAw&sa=X&oi=book

_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CAgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=&f=false

4

Much to the embarrassment of her literary son, Aldington's mother, [Jesse] May Aldington, published several novels. According to the Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction her works like Love Letters That Caused a Divorce, Meg of the Salt-Pans, The King Called Love and  A Man of Kent were confined "more or less exclusively to Kentish village life."